Trade of the Day: Time to Buy Diversity

Michael Sam's weekend selection by the St. Louis Rams in the seventh round of the National Football League draft made him the first openly gay player in the U.S.'s most-watched sports league. Across the pond, bearded Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst, real name Tom Neuwirth, won the 59th annual Eurovision Song Contest in front of an estimated television audience of 125 million.

As the chart below shows, Credit Suisse's Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender Equality Index, which tracks the performance of U.S. companies that score at least 80 on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, has underperformed the Standard & Poor's 500 Index by 25 percent in the past five years. So the Trade of the Day is to buy companies that celebrate diversity; the tide may be turning for the better.

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Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg View columnist and member of the editorial board. He has worked at Bloomberg News since 1991, most recently as London bureau chief. He is the author of "Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable."
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